2 B, or not 2 B More

Finally saw the new Nike spot with Carmelo Anthony. Impressive. I wish Nike didn't force us to see all the Flash graphics flying across the screen during the preview, but, what can you do?

That shoot was so long, so hard, and so... well, profitable. I remember showing up at the rec center on Pennsylvania Ave, and looking at an empty gym with a pile of lumber, and thinking "Ok... we shoot in four days..." Under the thumb of legendary production designer Vance Lorenzini, however, we cranked it out. We built that long tunnel out of luan and fiberglass, routing the fiberglass sheets to make it look like cinder block. We strung up half of Myrtle Ave with practicals, rebuilt an old treadmill for Melo's greenscreen shots, and, came up with some authentic beat-up street basketballs, plus the other thousand or so little props and pieces of set dressing that make up a big shoot like this. The street ball was a fun story: I drove Vance around the neighborhood looking for a nicely aged basketball. We found a young fellow shooting hoops, not far from our set.

"What will you take for the basketball?" Vance asked the kid.

Eyeing my gray A4 Quattro, he says "That Audi will do."

After some negotiations, he was happy with some bills.

So we wrangled our props, and built our sets, and then came shooting day: The crew went from a handful of us in the art department, to an enormous concoction of specialists, clients, Nike execs, ad agency people, security, helicopter pilots, and a thousand or so eager onlookers. A film set is, at any given time, the most meticulously organized form of chaos known to man.

For a while, Antoine Fuqua was happy... but not for long. It seemed like every department had some kind of glitch, including mine. The hours were brutal: Four forced calls, and one day came in at 16.5 hours without a lunch break. Tempers flared, and everybody was miserable. I even missed the Redskins come-from-behind defeat of Dallas on Monday Night Football, as we worked well past midnight that Monday (after a 7 AM call).

But... none of that matters. The spots look great. The editing is fantastic, to the point where even I can't tell where it's Melo on screen or his stand-in. The music is haunting. The authenticity of the location a stroke of genius. We pulled it off. I'm proud to have been a small part of this ad. And yeah, if you look closely in the extras on the Nike web site, you can see me. Well, my out-of-focus outline.

Ah, fame.